A couple of hours circular walk around the Over side of RSPB Ouse Fen in Cambridgeshire today; almost 6km, about 9000 steps (for what that’s worth), according to the fitness app on my phone.
First sighting was a Hare dashing away as I got out of the car. Then, there were countless Reed Warblers to be heard jazzily kvetching among the reeds along with the less chaotic calls of the Reed Buntings, which sound like Yellowhammers that have been given the wrong musical score. An occasional Bittern boom interrupted the dialogue and one of those swooped very close flying across the river at Brownshill Staunch just I’d reached that point on the walk. A Pied Wagtail hopped and wagged its way along the railings there as I was heading back. No butterflies sighted at this point.
Back on the main part of the reserve, at least a couple of dozen Hobbies were making a flap about hunting and eating insects on the wing, some high, some low-flying. A couple of Great White Egrets lazily took to the air and different points and times and both settled back down not a few dozen metres from where they started, they must have had a reason.
In the shrubby tree area along the edge of the new footpath/bridleway there was even more birdsong – numerous Garden Warblers, Common Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat, Blackcap, Robin, Sedge Warbler, Wren, Great Tit, Chiffchaff, and distant corvids and Coots, and every, invisible Cetti’s Warblers (I heard half a dozen, but only saw the one as it darted from tree to tree). What’s a warbler, anyway?
Sitting up on the bench on the mound overlooking the southern part of the reserve, I could hear a Cuckoo and caught sight of it perched in a short tree a couple of hundred metres away. Far too far for a decent photo with all the heat haze on a sunny day like today. A second was calling from further along the canal towards the car park. Not far off, a Grey Heron shed its grey load as I stood up to head back to the car park and a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly hove into view ahead of me, took quick for a snapshot. Once back at the car park, I dictated this article into my phone to save on typing and as I was doing that watched a Cattle Egret come up from the cows and calves I’d circled when I first got here. The bird itself circled and landed in almost exactly the same spot that a scavenging Marsh Harrier had come down, having hovered briefly above the spot.
Among the other songs and calls, the incessant groans of Wood Pigeon and a Green Woodpecker laughing, or yaffling, at me as it undulates out of sight and out of reach of the camera. A couple of Yellowhammer, dashed from the tree near the car to another a few feet away as I clicked the key and unlocked the car, and a Whitethroat made the same panicky dash.
The wind through the trees, the babbling of fish and diving birds in the water, the constant songs and calls of all the other aves, seems curious to pass a young fellow wearing all-enclosing, noise-cancelling headphones as he walked past me with a curt nod. What could possibly be on his playlist that’s more worthy than a dozen warblers and a yaffle?
My playlist for the morning had 38 birds…there were probably others I didn’t quite notice or note.
Bittern
Blackcap
Black-headed Gull
Blackbird
Buzzard
Carrion Crow
Cattle Egret
Cetti’s Warbler
Chiffchaff
Collared Dove
Coot
Cuckoo
Garden Warbler
Goldfinch
Great Crested Grebe
Great White Egret
Green Woodpecker
Greylag Goose
Grey Heron
Hobby
Kestrel
Lapwing
Lesser Whitethroat
Linnet
Little Egret
Mallard
Marsh Harrier
Magpie
Mute Swan
Pied Wagtail
Reed Bunting
Reed Warbler
Robin
Rook
Sedge Warbler
Whitethroat
Wren
Yellowhammer